Category: Current Affairs

Elections on the horizon in Israel. The Washington Post gives a rundown of recent events and what happens next.

The Guardian has a despatch from Pyinmana – the small town that has unexpectedly become the new capital of Burma/Myanmar. It’s conveniently situated 250 miles into the jungle, away from the former capital Rangoon/Yangon.

The BBC reports that trials will take place of x-ray machines and body scanners at railway stations. This will slow up passengers and ensure that money is diverted away from services, while also providing no extra security (since not all stations can or will be covered).

Alastair Darling’s view: “You cannot have a completely closed system on the underground or the railways for instance – it just wouldn’t work.”

X-ray machines at stations = just wouldn’t work. You read it here second.

Battered by the OFT’s claims of fee-fixing, the Independent Schools Council has come out whining. In a statement quoted at the BBC News website, their general secretary, Jonathan Shephard, managed to exhibit all the worst traits of the English middle classes, self-righteousness, special pleading and defensiveness.

His bleat was, more or less: the poor independent schools didn’t know the rules had changed, and it was all quite sensible, and no-one minded really, and surely laws were only for poor people to obey, and the OFT were being beastly cads who just didn’t understand how gentlemen behaved, and why don’t the OFT go and catch some real criminals rather than nice middle class people doing 70 in a 30 zone who just happen to be blatantly flouting anti-cartel laws.

Most extraordinary was his claim that:

“Schools have no motive to raise more money than they need. Any money raised from fees has to be spent on the children and the schools so any extra money might be spent on better food or another brick for the gym.”

Yes, or massively subsidised accommodation for teachers, new wallpaper for the Headmaster’s study, or perhaps a jaguar-fur lined jaccuzi for the staff room.

As I’m sure he and his colleagues have said to a thousand pupils: Stop snivelling, Shephard, and take it like a man.

Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate and evangelical wingnut, has told the people of Dover (PA):

If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God — you just rejected Him from your city.

Why? Well, at the elections last week Dover’s citizens booted out their school board for promoting the teaching of ‘intelligent’ design instead of evolution, and incidentally making the town a global laughing stock.

But God’s cross now. Honest, Pat says so. Brrrrr!

(via The Washington Post)

A European monitoring centre reports that Britain has done well on combatting racism since the tube bombings.

In the final act of the hilarious school fee fixing scandal, the OFT has ruled that 50 independent schools may have broken competition law by telling each other what they were going to charge parents.

This sort of information exchange, as you might imagine, is just slightly illegal. If the bursar at my school, the amiable but non-whizz-kid Major Dixon (retd) is anything to go by, it was just good chaps keeping each other informed (in flagrant breach of the law).

BBC news reports that Kaliningrad (Królowiec, Koenigsberg) – the capital of that small sliver of Russia that used to be a bit of German East Prussia – is going to erect a statue, and name a square in honour of, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Given that the city’s existence in its present form is a direct consequence of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s something of a nostalgia for the old days in what is now a vast Russian military base.

Le Figaro reports that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, new president of Iran, has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ – the first time for several years that an Iranian leader has made such a statement.

The Paris government has condemned the statement. No sign of it on the British or US press yet.

As the death toll of US service personnel in Iraq touches 2,000 (and, of course the death toll of Iraqis is much higher), the New York Times has a long piece profiling some of the families of the dead.